INVESTOR TOOK THE PAINFUL ROUTE TO STARTING BIOTECH

The most painful way might be as follows: You’re Jay Lichter, managing partner of Avalon Ventures, and you’re driving your car near the post office in La Jolla, and all of a sudden you have a horrible attack of vertigo.

You pull the car to the curb, convince yourself you’re dying of a heart attack, notice you are still alive after 15 minutes, no pain in the chest, but you still can’t sit up, can’t get out of the car. You call your secretary, who takes you to the hospital where your wife is waiting.

The doctors run the tests and it turns out to be Meniere’s, a disease of the inner ear, which you note after quickly Googling, strikes 615,000 Americans each year. The doctor staring into your own ear happens to be Jeffrey Harris, chief of otolaryngology at UCSD, and so you soon suggest starting a company together.

You call it Otonomy (ears plus “autonomy” in case you don’t want to sell it off later) and you patent a sustained-release steroid gel that makes you and a whole lot of other people with vertigo or bad ringing in their ears (tinnitus) feel better. You later come up with a steroid antibiotic to treat toddlers with chronic ear infections.

Lichter, 51, now long recovered, leads life sciences investments for Avalon’s $200 million Fund X. Lichter was a postdoc from Yale in pharmacogenetics before he came to San Diego in 1993 to co-found Sequana with Avalon originator Kevin Kinsella. He holds more than 260 patents and patent applications for six current Avalon companies, including Otonomy, Afraxis, Carolus, Zacharon Pharmaceuticals, and Sova, and sits on their boards. Lichter also sits on the board of Aratana, the medical company for dogs and cats, and the John Wayne Cancer Center.

So if Otonomy was a painful launch — “but cork-popping at the end,” Lichter is quick to add — then what’s the painless route?

That might be curling up with a good scientific paper, calling up the author Susumu Tonegawa, Nobel laureate at MIT, and proposing they start a company around Tonegawa’s research, which had begun to show that a rare genetic cause of autism disorders might be cured by inhibiting a certain protein in the brain. Their company, Afraxis, was bought last month by Genentech for some $178 million. When the product is given to what appear to be autistic mice, they no longer cower in corners or engage in repetitive motion.

Painless to lucky, in terms of how Avalon meets up with good ideas, might be called the Sorrento Valley Coffee Shop approach, frequenting Zumbar’s, the biotech hangout, and ordering enough lattes long enough that people like Floyd Romesberg walk up and ask, “You’re a VC? Well, I have an idea,” as Lichter recalls the story of Avalon partner Court Turner’s meeting with Romesberg, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute.

Romesberg’s idea turned out to be a highly novel arrow from the quiver of evolutionary genetics. Some bacteria (and maybe a lot of creatures closer to us) can actually regulate their own evolution when they really need to, with a special enzyme.